Richard Yeend's Neuseidler Antiqua is a superb addition to the TakeType Library, combining historical forms with practical, digital use. The Neuseidler Antiqua font family, made up of three weights, is inspired by the Austrian art nouveau movement, which took place from c.1890 to 1910. During this time period, Gustav Klimt, and other artists came together with architects like Otto Wagner to create a style that spoke to the modern era, the dawning 20th Century, and to the desired combination of art and industry. Neuseidler's letters are each drawn with a single, mono-weight line, which is rounded at its ends. The overall forms of the letters are geometric and relatively rectilinear. The family's three weights, Neuseidler Regular, Neuseidler Bold, and Neuseidler Heavy each have supplementary Alternate fonts available for purchase.
These three fonts, Neuseidler Alternate Regular, Neuseidler Alternate Bold, and Neuseidler Alternate Heavy, each contain extra ligatures, swash capitals, and special decorative letters for use in conjunction with their respective fonts. Using Neuseidler together with its Alternates offers additional typographic choices that are not available in many other fonts modeled after the art nouveau style. Neuseidler's weights ship in OpenType format, and incorporate old style figures. Art nouveau is sometime referred to as the first international artistic movement. Artists and designers from different countries were employing similar methods in their work, yet creating slightly different styles. For example, the French style was quite different from the Viennese. French art nouveau was typically more curvilinear and organic. This formalism was applied to type design and lettering as well. If you are looking for a turn of the century font with a rounder feeling, check out Eckmann, Arnold Boecklin, Auriol, and Metropolitaines. The entire Neuseidler family, including all six fonts, are part of the Take Type 5 collection, released by Linotype in 2003.
